I’m not a fan of k8s, but “serverless” imo is not a good trade either, especially AWS lambda. ECS with ALB is probably an ok middle, but still expensive, even with heavy use of Spot instances. Cloud isn’t going to be getting cheaper..
It is certainly cheaper than the engineer time it takes to run and manage k8s at enterprises. It's a perfectly good trade.
Aren't we exaggerating the whole Kubernetes is difficult thing a bit? Unix is also more complex than DOS, still glad we didn't get stuck with the latter bc it was "good enough"